We left the Getty about lunchtime and drove through the endless sprawl of suburban Los Angeles, letting the cruise control keep us at the double nickel and trying to get the measure of our new car.
The city eventually petered out into the desert, and we stopped at Barstow for a late lunch of burger-n-fries at In-N-Out. The words “Maybe we can sit outside at one of the tables,” died in my throat as we opened the door and the car’s bubble of air-conditioned comfort evaporated instantaneously. Christ, it was hot. The 40-degree temperature and scorching sun had us coated with a film of sweat within seconds. To a Scot used to bone-chilling winters and year-round rain, the sheer impact of a normal day’s weather out here is staggering. It’s like hunkering in front of an open electric oven at full bore, or pointing a brace of hairdryers at your face: this is weather to be measured in kilowatts rather than centigrade.
Once inside, we ordered from the famously brief menu (burger, cheeseburger, fries and/or drinks) and sat down to salivate in anticipation. I’ve waxed rhapsodic about In-N-Out before, but it bears repeating: this is perfect fast food. Crisp, cold lettuce, onions and tomato; tasty, non-greasy hamburgers and excellent fries. If this isn’t enough for you, you can flip your cup over to reveal the bible reference on its base and marvel that a simple In-N-Out burger-n-fries might be the most faithful representation of all that’s right and all that’s wrong with America. (Obviously, I have fine-tuned my original thesis — “zOMG!! In-N-Out is awesome!” — over the intervening years.)
Our immaculate burgers finished, we dashed back to the car. Against Ash’s better judgement and hoping that the wind would keep us cool, I dropped the roof (the combination of the open road and a convertible pony car was too much to resist) and we burbled off into the Mojave Desert towards Vegas.
We’d been taking turns to drive, and were both getting the hang of the car. Ash took to it like a duck to water, used to driving lumbering automatic beasts like V8 Cadillacs and old Chevy pickups, but I had taken a while to get a feel for it. Now that I had, though, I wanted to see what our Mustang could do.
I pulled us off the highway onto a side road just past a sign for the town of Zzyzx (lexicographically speaking, the last place in America) and parked on the sandy verge. I switched off the traction control and thumbed the overdrive button hidden on the far side of the gear lever, turning it off. I had a need to burn rubber. Ash rolled her eyes. “Just be careful, okay?”
The road was clear as far as the eye could see, and the eye could see pretty far on the rolling desert plain. I mashed the throttle to the floor; the engine roared, and we jerked forward with a disappointing absence of smoking tyres. The speedo swept upwards past 60 mph and I eased off once it became obvious that nothing particularly earth-shattering was going to happen. The sad truth was that short of a transmission-(and rental agreement)-busting brake stand, 210 horsepower in our tonne-and-a-half car wasn’t enough to spin the wheels on the asphalt. So I did it in a gravel lay-by instead. It wasn’t really the same.
Bored of the I15, we followed this desert road for a few miles as it shadowed the interstate. The road had a few gentle curves, and the Mustang’s underlying character became evident. It wasn’t bad per se, but it had an odd tendency to undermine each of its basic competencies with a single glaring fault. There was plenty of grip, for example, but there was no feedback at all through the steering wheel so that instead of ‘handling’ it had ‘guessing’. The 244-cube V6 would hustle the car along quickly enough when prodded but sounded unhappy when doing so. The ride was comfortable for the most part, but the solid rear axle would smash across any potholes with a horrific bang. The interior was well laid out but the visibility to the sides and back was less than great. And so the list of almost-theres went on.
It all added up to a frustrating driving experience: a car which could shift when you really needed it to but which discouraged you from doing so on anything other than a straight road of millpond-like flatness. The Trøll, God rest its soul — and bear in mind we’re talking about a seventeen-year-old car first manufactured thirteen years before that — would have run rings around the Mustang in just about any real-life driving situation but one: the one where an arrow-straight road of freshly laid asphalt spears off toward the horizon. And putting it like that, I suppose the Mustang was exactly what it should have been.
“Wait, wait — go back,” Ash said suddenly. I stopped and she pointed behind us. “That road sign is full of bullet holes!”
It was indeed. We got back onto the I15 and stayed on it all the way to Vegas.
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